SOURCE: "Childhood Hurt and Fear as a Writer's Inspiration," in New York Times, October 7, 1997, p. E8.

In the following review, Kakutani discusses the early elements of Coetzee's life, as described in Boyhood, that led to his later writing career.

Though Boyhood has the stylized, fablelike quality of so much of J. M. Coetzee's fiction, it is not a coming-of-age novel, but a memoir that happens to be told in the third person and the present tense. It is a fiercely revealing, bluntly unsentimental work that both creates a telling portrait of the artist as a young man and illuminates the hidden courses of his art.

Indeed, the seeds of Mr. Coetzee's mature work—Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, Foe and Age of Iron—can all be found in this slim volume. Mr. Coetzee's fascination with power and the Darwinian equation it draws between...